Media fail in coverage of assaults

Tuesday

Mar 26, 2013 at 6:00 AM

By Dianne Williamson

Two years before CNN and other media organizations shamed themselves with skewed coverage of the Steubenville rape trial, the Onion produced a sadly funny satire of a college basketball star that drips with all the requisite hero worship of sports television.

“Jacob Ross is Big-12 athlete, dedicated student and a fierce competitor,” intones a voice-over, as we watch the fictional Jacob shoot hoops in the gym. “But his greatest achievement came off the court, in his freshman year, when he overcame the trauma of committing a terrible rape.”

It’s a good case of art imitating cable TV, which recently dropped the ball in appalling fashion while covering the case of two teens who raped a 16-year-old girl so drunk that she was occasionally unconscious. It’s one of the cases you’d see in a Lifetime movie — the boys were small-town football stars, some kids watched and took pictures, and many in the sports-crazy Ohio town blamed the victim for destroying the boys’ lives.

Even CNN came close to Onion-style satire. When covering the guilty verdicts, Candy Crowley and Poppy Harlow spoke sympathetically about the once “promising future” of Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, how they’d be forever haunted by the label of registered sex offender, and the overall impact of a guilty verdict on these poor convicted rapists.

“Incredibly difficult, even for an outsider like me, to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart,” Harlow told Crowley.

Cry me a river, but that’s what happens when you rape someone. The victim was hardly mentioned, partly because the rapists’ tears made good television, and the girl wasn’t in court for the verdict.

Still, such sympathetic coverage is inexcusable. It’s one thing for news anchors to discuss the ramification of a verdict on a defendant; it’s quite another to frame the issue as a tragic tale of young lives cut short by the legal system, rather than by their conscious choice to rape a young girl.

The details are revolting. Passed out in a car, the victim was digitally penetrated by Mays while another boy videotaped the act. Later, in one of the boy’s basements, Mays was kneeling and exposing himself as he tried to get the unconscious girl to perform a sex act. Meanwhile, Richmond penetrated her with his fingers.

We should be worried that in 2013, despite all the focus on sexual assault, teenagers watched two athletes commit a horrible crime and did nothing to stop it. Instead, they took pictures and sent tweets on their cellphones. Two girls tweeted threats to the victim and have been charged by the Ohio attorney general, who plans to convene a grand jury to investigate if anyone else should be charged.

Good for him, bad for CNN. It goes without saying that adults should set the tone and stress the consequences of committing such heinous acts, to discourage future ones. No news coverage should indicate that being charged with rape is almost as bad as being raped. No one should portray sex offenders as victims.

Just as the Steubenville case concluded came word of another alleged sexual assault, closer to home, with striking similarities. In Connecticut, two Torrington High football players have been charged with molesting different 13-year-old girls, one of whom has been called a “whore” and a snitch by classmates who sympathize with the boys.

This must stop, and the media must do our part to reject any culture in which girls are treated like inanimate sex toys, and then blamed for coming forward. In such cases, covering “both sides” isn’t objective journalism — it’s irresponsible and wrong.